World Summit on the Information Society

At WSIS,
in a climate of suppression of dissent, the score is 0-0-- Richard Stallman

The World Summit on the Information Society is supposed to
formulate plans to end the “digital divide” and make the
internet accessible to everyone on Earth. The negotiations were
completed in November, so the big official meeting in Geneva last week
was more of a trade show and conference than a real summit
meeting.

The summit procedures were designed so that non-governmental
organizations (mainly those that promote human rights and equality,
and work to reduce poverty) could attend, see the discussions, and
comment. However, the actual declaration paid little attention to the
comments and recommendations that these organizations made. In effect,
civil society was offered the chance to speak to a dead mike.

The summit's declaration includes little that is bold or new. When
it comes to the question of what people will be free to do
with the internet, it responds to demands made by various governments
to impose restrictions on citizens of cyberspace.

Part of the digital divide comes from artificial obstacles to the
sharing of information. This includes the licenses of non-free
software, and harmfully restrictive copyright laws. The Brazilian
declaration sought measures to promote free software, but the US
delegation was firmly against it (remember that the Bush campaign got
money from Microsoft). The outcome was a sort of draw, with the final
declaration presenting free software, open source, and proprietary
software as equally legitimate. The US also insisted on praising
so-called “intellectual property rights”. (That biased
term
promotes simplistic over-generalization; for the sake of clear
thinking about the issues of copyright law, and about the very
different issues of patent law, that term should always be
avoided.)

The declaration calls on governments to ensure unhindered access to
the public domain, but says nothing about whether any additional works
should ever enter the public domain.

Human rights were given lip service, but the proposal for a
“right to communicate” (not merely to access information)
using the internet was shot down by many of the countries. The summit
has been criticized for situating its 2005 meeting in Tunisia, which
is a prime example of what the information society must not do.
People have
been
imprisoned in Tunisia for using the internet to criticize the
government.

Suppression of criticism has been evident here at the summit too.
A counter-summit, actually a series of talks and discussions, was
planned for last Tuesday, but it was shut down by the Geneva police
who clearly were searching for an excuse to do so. First they claimed
that the landlord did not approve use of the space, but the tenant who
has a long-term lease for the space then arrived and said he had
authorized the event. So the police cited a fire code violation which
I'm told is applicable to most buildings in Geneva—in effect, an
all-purpose excuse to shut down anything. Press coverage of this
maneuver eventually forced the city to allow the counter-summit to
proceed on Wednesday in a different location.

In a more minor act of suppression, the moderator of the official
round table in which I spoke told me “your time is up”
well before the three minutes each participant was supposed to have.
She later did the same thing to the EPIC representative. I later
learned that she works for the International Chamber of
Commerce—no wonder she silenced us. And how telling that the
summit would put a representative of the ICC at the throttle when we
spoke.

Suppression was also visible in the exclusion of certain NGOs from
the summit because their focus on human rights might embarrass the
governments that trample them. For instance, the
summit
refused to accredit Human Rights In China, a group that criticizes
the Chinese government for (among other things) censorship of the
internet.

Reporters
Without Borders was also excluded from the summit. To raise
awareness of their exclusion, and of the censorship of the internet in
various countries, they set up an unauthorized radio station in nearby
France and handed out mini-radios, so that summit attendees could hear
what the organization had been blocked from saying at the summit
itself.

The summit may have a few useful side effects. For instance,
several people came together to plan an organization to help
organizations in Africa switch to GNU/Linux. But the summit did
nothing to support this activity beyond providing an occasion for us
to meet. Nor, I believe, was it intended to support any such thing.
The overall attitude of the summit can be seen in its having invited
Microsoft to speak alongside, and before, most of the various
participating governments—as if to accord that criminal
corporation the standing of a state.